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Product Description

Product Description

Dark clouds gather over the once peaceful landscape. Wild barbarians, lured by Catan's wealth and power, maneuver to attack. Their massive warships loom against the orange horizon.
You must be strong! Barbarians attack the weakest targets, and the victim of their onslaught will be the player who contributes the least to the defense of Catan. Don't take any chances! Field your knights!
In The Cities & Knights of Catan, you engage in the defense of Catan and compete to build the three great metropolises of Catan. Each of these magnificent centers are even more valuable than cities and are safe from the barbarians.
You must invest in city improvements, which you acquire using commodities of trade: Coin, Paper, and Cloth. If you improve your culture, muster your knights, and enrich your cities, you will be the master of the great realm of Catan! Made in the USA.

From the Manufacturer

Dark clouds gather over the once peaceful landscape. Wild barbarians, lured by Catan's wealth and power, maneuver to attack. Their massive warships loom against the orange horizon. You must be strong. Barbarians attack the weakest targets, and the victim of their onslaught will be the player who contributes the least to the defense of Catan. Don't take any chances. Field your knights. In The Cities and Knights of Catan, you engage in the defense of Catan and compete to build the three great metropolises of Catan. Each of these magnificent centers are even more valuable than cities and are safe from the barbarians. You must invest in city improvements, which you acquire using commodities of trade: Coin, Paper, and Cloth. If you improve your culture, muster your knights, and enrich your cities, you will be the master of the great realm of Catan. This edition features all new artwork, and an insert tray to hold game components for up to 6 players

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

I got this expansion along with the original game and played it after playing a couple games with the original rules. The basic changes to the original game include:

1) Instead of the development deck, you now have three progress decks (sciences, trade, and politics) which offer a broader selection of usable cards than the development deck and it's 90% knights and 10% events/actions. These decks correspond to three possible areas of improvement (see next item) and have some interesting effects (everything from allowing you to take cards from another player to pulling resources for free).

2) Cities can now be improved. You get a set of flip cards that you flip as you purchase city improvements. There are two benefits to city improvements: a) when you achieve the 3rd level of improvements you gain some bonus like the ability to trade two of any commodity for one resource or commodity (note: as commented on, this is not like the harbor benefit of 2:1 resources which limit you to trading resources for resources; however, it still comes in handy despite the limitation), and b) each improvement increases the changes you'll get to pull from one of the three progress decks.

3) The addition of an event die that you roll along with the standard 2d6. The event die will either move the barbarians closer (50% chance) or trigger a chance to pull from the progress decks (16% chance). As mentioned, city improvements increase your chances of scoring a card when one of the progress areas are rolled (i.e. if you get a 1 or 2 on the red die and a blue icon on the event die and you have the first city improvement in the science area, you can draw a card).Read more ›

This is a wonderful, highly addictive family board game. We got the original Settlers for Christmas and loved it so in January we saw this at the toy store and thought we would try it. Well, 3 months later my wife and 10 year old daughter and I are still playing it almost every night. It is a little more challening than "Settlers" and has even more variations and strategy so I would not recommend it for children less than 10. You have to have the original "Settlers of Catan to play. It takes about 20 minutes to learn to play and games typically take 1 to 2 hours. There are all sorts of different strategies to use and because the board varies each time you play no two games are the same. There is some cutthroat potential in the game so if your family is prone to violence you might try something else. On the other hand if you are looking for a fun, challenging game that will get your children and spouse off the computer and television to spend some time together this is highly recommended.

My coworkers and I loved to play a rousing game of Catan over lunch breaks and we decided to pick up this expansion. As others have noted, it does add a bunch of new features and adds complexity. It's still mostly Catan, and a decently fun game. Nice for a change of pace if you have a group of regular gaming friends.

The main negative against this game is the progress cards. You get progress cards whenever the third dice rolls your progress color and the red dice matches up with your city progress advancement. You can play as many as you want each turn. This, like dev cards in the original, at the start can lead to some fun surprises that mix up the gameplay. However, when you get to mid to end game where everyone has commodities advanced, it seems to us that every turn people are throwing 1-2 progress cards and the game seems to devolve into who is lucky enough to get a stack of the best cards, draw 8+ resources, score 4 points in one turn, and win. We're considering curbing the progress cards to be one play per turn, because everyone playing multiples seems to make the game border on ridiculousness.

A negative for us (but not for others) is that since we play over lunch break, the original catan we could finish in under an hour with 4 players. Cities and Knights usually takes 4 of us about an hour and a half, most of this being due to the more complex resource distributions (remembering commodity cards, moving the barbarian ships, distributing progress cards, etc). One is almost tempted to institute a rule that if the players forget to ask for a card, they don't get it, because it's too much for a banker to keep track of and slows the game. If you're not under a time constraint though this isn't an issue I suppose.

This expansion makes the basic game very very enjoyable, although it does extend the playing time quite a bit. In short, the expansion introduces two new aspects. One is building "knights" to protect from pirates that invade the island from time to time (decided based on a third "event" dice). The second aspect is a suite of 'new development cards' that give you much more options than the original set of development cards e.g. you can temporarily downgrade your opponents city, remove their roads, steal their knights etc. in addition to the monopoly, free road building etc. How do you get these development cards? Instead of buying them (like in the basic version), you get them also based on the event dice. However, to get them you need to 'flip' a book to get city extensions. In the basic version, all resources are doubled for a city - here three of the resources give you one resource and one commodity and these commodity cards are used to flip - so it is a cycle: you get commodity cards, you flip - flipping increases your chances of getting the development cards. This makes the game very very interesting with a lot more strategies involved.

One thing to know: The currently available version is 4th edition. The backs of the cards do not have any difference compared to 3rd edition. So they are *compatible*. The artwork in the flip books are a little different, but still recognizable (I have posted pictures). However, the basic 3rd edition has two 'natural' dices. The expansion needs a 'colored' red dice to decide the development card acquisition using the event dice. *UPDATE*: I contacted Mayfair customer service and they said they will ship a red dice 'free' to customers on request!